Chemical Transformation on Restructured Transition Metal Oxides

Franklin (Feng) Tao

Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry

University of Notre Dame

Franklin (Feng) Tao joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at University of Notre Dame in 2010 after a postdoctoral fellowship at University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Currently, he is a tenure-track assistant professor. He severs on editorial boards of Scientific Reports of Nature Publishing group and advisory editorial boards of Chemical Society of Reviews and Catalysis Science & Technology of RSC and a couple of other journals. He was elected as a fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry in 2013. He has published about 100 peer-reviewed articles.

The research projects of Franklin (Feng) Tao group are in the interdisciplinary field of heterogeneous catalysis, nanoscience, analytical chemistry, materials chemistry, and surface science. We focus on important catalysis at nanoscale involved in chemical transformation, energy conversion, pollution control, and environmental remediation. The goal of our research projects is to develop efficient nanocomposite catalytic systems using syntheses that build on the atomic level information obtained from our operando studies.

The researches in Franklin (Feng) Tao group include (1) synthesis of nanostructured catalytic materials with controllable composition and structure, (2) measurement of catalytic performance and energy efficiency, (3) in-situ and perando studies of structure of nanocatalysts under reaction conditions with HPHT-STM and in-situ catalytic measurements, (4) exploring chemical reactions of energy conversion occurring at the solid-gas and even the solid-liquid interfaces of nanocatalyst using AP-XPS and on-line measurement of catalytic products, and (5) instrumentation for advanced analysis of solid surfaces in reactive environment.